Google has turned its gaze away from worthy goals like predicting the spread of flu to more challenging tasks like forecasting the winner of this Saturday’s Eurovision Song Contest.
Like the flu prediction service, Google is studying search trends on particular keywords to come to its conclusions. It excludes searches from a contestants own country, because you can’t vote for your own entry.
Personally I’ll be impressed if Google can pull this off. As any student of Eurovision knows, simple ‘popularity’ ranks quite a bit behind the simmering stew of post-cold war politics across Europe in terms of influence on voting. So the countries of the former Soviet Union may hate Russia at a governmental level, but the large numbers of Russian diaspora guarantee a healthy slug of votes flowing back to Mother Russia.
Presumably search volume – and hence accuracy – will improve closer to the final on the 16th May. Right now Google has Turkey and Norway neck and neck for the win, just ahead of Greece. The punters on Betfair have the same top three, but with Norway clearly ahead of Greece and Turkey.
...and it looks like Google got it right - just as we go into voting, the Eurovision predictor has:
#1 Norway 388
#2 Turkey 358
And it looks like Norway will be clear winners, with Turkey in the top three.
They didn't spot Iceland though, who are currently second - not generating enough search volume (and perhaps they haven't paid their broadband bills?)